Investigation the Effect of Covıd-19 Pandemic in The Sales for Online Education Using Machine Learning Methods

Abstract

Due to the pandemic which is the cause of the COVID-19 virus that emerged in 2019, many educational institutions had to follow online (remote) education. The situation in which the content of the pandemic occurred was also the reason for the education preferences of the users. The aim of this study is to analyze the effect of the pandemic, which includes the number of registered users of one of the online education platforms operating in Turkey thanks to machine learning, on distance education sales, and to create strategies by making sales forecasts for the future. Seven independent and one dependent variable were used to make sales forecasts using the data of the education structure. For accurate modelling, machine learning methods were first applied for decision analytics in a univariate manner and then multivariate applied and the applied methods were tested for error. By testing the success of the prediction models created with machine learning used in the study; 91.43% for support vector machine (SVM), 92.02% for multi-layer perceptron (MLP), and 96% for Long / Short Term Memory (LSTM). K-Folds cross validation method was also used for the success return of the established model.